MIKE JOZIC: Let's start with the mini-series since Galactica is probably going to be the focus of this. Now, you're credited with 'Additional Music By…'

BEAR McCREARY: Yeah.

JOZIC: So, what exactly does that mean?

McCREARY: Well, it usually means exactly that. There's a certain amount of music that needs to get written and sometimes, as was the case on the mini-series, it's a lot of music with very little time. One of the ways that Richard [Gibbs] got around it was having me writing music with him. I've worked with him in this capacity for a while, and at that time he called me back in to start writing when he got the call to do the show. We ended up on this, sort of, constant 24 hour rotation where he would write for 8 or 10 hours and I would come in at 6 or 7 at night and I would write for about 8 or 10 hours. We had somebody writing on his rig pretty much 24 hours a day to get all the music finished. At the same time I would work with the producers and Richard developed a lot of the thematic material. I focused on mainly the percussion side of things.

We split it up and we were able to get it all done.

JOZIC: Did you get any original cues of your own in the mini-series?

McCREARY: Oh, substantial, yeah. I mean, I don't know percentage-wise, but I wrote close to 40 minutes of music for the mini-series, probably.

JOZIC: You commented in another interview that the 'Additional Music By…' credit was a really generous one to have been given. What did you mean by that?

McCREARY: Well, it is, and the reason that it is is because this happens a lot more often than is credited in the film music business. It's not something that is new. Richard is really cool because if you write something with him he'll credit you. We split cue-sheet credit on cues that I wrote so if there's royalties involved I'm not shut out of those. There are situations and scenarios in which that doesn't happen. Richard is really upfront. He's not only literally crediting me on the film, but sharing the credit with the producers. When I was writing with him he kept me involved in working with Michael Rymer. If Michael would say, "Oh, I really like this cue, I want to talk about it" for the cue I wrote, he would bring me up and I would talk to Michael about and we would work it out. It wasn't like he was trying to take credit for work he didn't do, so that was cool.

JOZIC: I remember Danny Elfman getting some heat for that.

McCREARY: Yeah, but that was…It's funny you mention that because I was just talking with Steve Bartek about that today.

JOZIC: I hesitated to bring it up because of the Boingo connection.

McCREARY: It's cool. And I literally had this conversation with him, like, 8 hours ago.

That was all speculation. To my understanding, which is pretty good, he doesn't do that. Not to say he's never done it. I mean, everybody gets into a time crunch. It's quite possible it'll happen on the Battlestar Galactica series with me because you've got so much music to write and so little time. But I think Danny took the brunt of that because when he really hit it big he was really vocal about his level of experience in orchestral music, and I think, at the time, kind of naively assumed that people would understand that. Of course, nowadays, to say you have people orchestrate your music for you, people don't even blink. It's totally commonplace. But Danny was right at that transitional period where all the composers were supposed to be these collegiately trained guys and he's not - he's intuitive.

JOZIC: Well, you hear every other department on a show talking about how they're struggling to meet their deadlines so it's only natural that you guys are equally crunched.

McCREARY: Oh, music gets it worse than anybody else. The saving grace on Battlestar Galactica is the visual effects. Because what that means with having to render all these computer effects, they have a rough cut of the film done, like, a month before it dubs. So, rather than having four days to score a show I will have a month to score a show. The flipside of that is, in a month I'll have more shows than one just to score but it does give you a bigger window of time. So, for the first time in my experience, and generally speaking, in TV you don't have a lot of computer effects and it actually really benefits me. It really buys a lot of time for me to try and do something cool.

JOZIC: Do you do everything? Do you do the writing and the orchestrations and…

McCREARY: Yeah. I do orchestrate and copy. I have an engineer that does all the recording and mixing and I do all of the synthestration. It's basically a two man team. He's mixing all day while I'm writing all day and then we'll do sessions together and I go home and write some more and he mixes more. Like before, it takes the two of us working 24 hours a day to get it done.

In fact he was the engineer on the mini-series so he's familiar with everyone's expectations there.

JOZIC: How much of the score is electronic and how much of it is natural sounds?

McCREARY: Well, it fluctuates but I would say close to 50/50 - maybe 60/40 for synth.

JOZIC: Do you actually have sessions with an orchestra?

McCREARY: We don't get a full orchestra session, no. In the season finale that is a real orchestra, yes. So, I worked with an orchestra for the two-part season finale but even that, I didn't actually score the whole thing with an orchestra. We just had a little bit of time with them.

But the rest of it is a composite with a lot of synth tracks. A very minimal number of musicians but we do a lot of tracks. We'll layer in lots of live percussion and I have an electric fiddle player that comes in and does these really weird violin effects. 9 times out of 10 you'd never even know it was a guy making those sounds with a violin. He's really strange. There's also some guitar but it's the same thing where he doesn't want to sound like a guitar and we do some weird effects - stuff like that. Basically anything I can do to help enrich the sound. The synth is the basis and then after that...

JOZIC: You lay a lot of tracks?

McCREARY: It's a ridiculous number of tracks. It's embarrassing how many tracks. Yeah, it's insane.

JOZIC: Now, would that be well beyond the 'industry standard'?

McCREARY: So far beyond that it's ridiculous. When we first started my engineer was kind of like a deer in headlights. Working on all my projects he used to complain, like, "God, man, this is, like, 80 tracks, 90 tracks - this is ridiculous." The main title of Battlestar Galactica is somewhere in the order of 230 to 250 tracks. You can't even mix that at Fox, I mean, it's a lot. So, at this point, now, he's got this stoic attitude about it where he'll say, "Okay, bring it on."

It's not necessarily because I like a lot of tracks - though my engineer might argue that - but when you're doing a synth score it's a lot harder than doing an acoustic score, and in order to really get a lush, rich sound I try to use as many sounds as possible and layer in things and mask things and I try to make it really thick so that it hides the synthiness of it. It takes a lot of time and it takes a lot of tracks but I think it's worth it and hopefully the fans will notice a difference in the quality of the music.

The other saving grace, I should say, is that we're not trying to do orchestral music. I'm not doing orchestra mock-ups. It's not trying to be orchestral music so it gives us some leeway to mess around and try to create other timbres and other textures and I find that orchestral mock-ups are really frustrating. To me it's the indicator of a low-budget project - when you're watching a TV show or something and you hear strings and French horns and it just feels kind of tinny and canned. It's not real but they're writing it like it is. It's difficult because, obviously, most of the things on TV are low-budget but I'm very very grateful that the people at Battlestar have opened up some other options and let me mess around.

JOZIC: I've heard some composers do TV scores and they sound canned, like you said, but then you hear them cut loose with an 80 piece orchestra on a feature and you think, "Oh, they can write something rich and moving."

McCREARY: Yeah, and it's funny because you can hear that it's good music a lot of the time. Not all of the time, but a lot of the time it's good music. The feeling is genuine but somehow in the translation through all the synth it's lacking. I look at a show like Galactica and I don't think that it wants an orchestral score. The whole tone of it is different so I think it's really a good situation. Even if there was a budget to do a full orchestra on every show we wouldn't go with a traditional orchestral sound.

JOZIC: You commented in another interview that having that many tracks gave the producers more freedom when they were editing.

McCREARY: Yeah, you're talking about the final mix?

JOZIC: Yes.

McCREARY: Well, this is what you're probably getting at. Especially on Battlestar, the producers do not have time to listen to all the cues and mock-ups and give me comments. So, what it means is that most of the time, the first time they hear the music that I've written is at the dub stage and this is good and bad. The good side of this means that I do not spend a lot of time making revisions, making demos, running off demo CDs, burning DVDs, I just get the video, I talk to them a little bit and I do my thing. The bad side is pretty obvious. If they don't like it, it's already been recorded, it's already mixed and it has to be dubbed into the show the same day they hear it.

So, we split the final mix into a bunch of stems. I'm not sure what's common for TV, I mean, I know for theatrical films this is really common - you split it out into a ton of tracks, and we're no exception because you never know what sound someone at the show might like or dislike. A lot of times it gives you the leeway to mess around, and a lot of times we'll get to the final dub and we'll take certain tracks out or move things around and it just lets the producers be involved - and they should be. But then they don't have to listen to demos and the obvious requirement is that even if they don't like it, I gotta be close. If I'm in the ballpark with the cue then it's cool. And all of my experiences there have been good. We've never had a big disaster on the show.

JOZIC: So, how much trust and give-and-take is there?

McCREARY: A lot. The schedule requires a lot.

I think it's really grown, though, over the course of the season. As the producers got to know me and got to know my work they trusted me more and gave me a little more creative freedom, and I trusted them more. There were directions they wanted to take the music that my first instinct was to say, "What?" My first instinct was that it was wrong but they were right a lot of the time. So, they'd want to try something out so I would try it out and find a way to make it work. So, the score evolved in interesting ways and it's been a really good experience.

JOZIC: Richard Gibbs originally came over from the mini-series and did a few episodes of the series, did he not?

McCREARY: Yeah.

JOZIC: He did how many episodes?

McCREARY: He did two. He did episodes number 2 and 3.

JOZIC: When the show was picked up and Richard eventually decided to leave, did you have to audition for the show or was there a general attitude of, "Well, Richard's gone so Bear is in"?

McCREARY: A little of both. I know that there was some hesitation in the beginning. I think that's natural. The producers higher up in the chain that I didn't work with personally on the mini-series didn't know who I was. So, there was a certain amount of that and I think that the first episode that I scored was an audition. I really think if that had gone poorly they probably would have gone with someone else.

The first episode that I scored on my own was the first one - '33' - and that went really well. I think everyone was really happy with it and I could tell that episodes 4 and 5, the two-parter with Starbuck which were the next ones I tackled, went really well and from that point on I started hearing from them less and less. We met up at the dubs and everything sounds great and it was cool. But I'm sure there was some hesitation on their part. I don't blame them. It's a big show and at that time I had no credits, really.

Richard was also very cool about that - very encouraging of them to let me take a shot at it.

JOZIC: Did the two of you compose the main theme together?

McCREARY: Yes and no. [laughs] I wish I had simple answers for all of these questions.

JOZIC: Hey, the simple answers are the dull ones.

McCREARY: Well, no, we didn't ever actually collaborate, but the finished main title that you hear in the US represents work from both of us.

Richard wrote a main title that aired in the UK and before it aired in the US there was a decision to change the direction on it tonally and Richard was busy working on Fat Albert by the time they really needed to make up their minds so he passed it onto me so then I rewrote the beginning based on a piece from the score. The producers found a piece that I did on the score and they kind of temped it in to the first part of the main title and they thought it was cool and they wanted someone to rework that into a theme. So, the first half is my contribution and the second half - with all the drums and stuff - is pretty much verbatim from what Richard's UK theme had on it.

JOZIC: The part that shows the scenes…

McCREARY: From the episode you're about to watch, yeah.

JOZIC: So the main titles in the UK are different from the US titles?

McCREARY: Yeah. The main title theme - the music is different. They actually, technically, changed a couple of shots, too. It is my understanding that this is a point of contention with the fans so when we put the soundtrack album out in a month we're putting both themes on there.

JOZIC: That's a good idea.

McCREARY: Yeah, well Richard's theme is cool. It's got a vocal part to it and it's neat so I'm glad US fans will be able to hear it on the CD.

JOZIC: Well, our episodes are longer so…

McCREARY: That's true. Give and take.

JOZIC: When the Celtic piece, "Wander My Friends", showed up in episode 10 I had to ask myself, "Why is this here?" It was just so different thematically from anything that had appeared on the series up to that point. I'm curious why you went in that direction?

McCREARY: Going back to what we said earlier about trust, there are decisions the producers wanted to make that I was hesitant [about]. I mean, putting in a strong Celtic bagpipe piece with a choir, I would have never done that on my own, but they wanted to take it in that direction so I tried it out and it was pretty cool. The whole episode, tonally, is a little different from the rest of the series. It's more emotional. It's not so dark, you know? There is a lightness and closure at the end of that episode with the big celebration. There isn't really another scene in the series like that, at least so far. Once we tried that out and it worked, I took the sound and kind of incorporated it into the rest of the score to soften the blow of the shift in tone earlier in the episode when Commander Adama gives [Lee] the lighter. And, ultimately, it kind of serves as this noble Adama family theme and it has an element of tradition to it and an element of military nobility so it's kind of cool. I don't know if I'll ever have a chance to bring it back - I certainly hope so - but that's how that one evolved.

JOZIC: If it's an Adama theme than maybe you will.

McCREARY: Yeah, I would imagine so. I would imagine that there's going to be more drama between the father and son.

JOZIC: Have you started thinking about Season 2 yet?

McCREARY: I've definitely been thinking about it. I've got some great ideas but I haven't started writing it yet.

JOZIC: Well, they haven't started shooting yet.

McCREARY: Yeah, they started 2 weeks ago. We're going on the air in July.

JOZIC: I heard it was going ot be a summer release.

McCREARY: Yeah, it's soon. They started on the 21st of March so…

JOZIC: You'll be getting some stuff soon?

McCREARY: I would imagine very soon, yes.

JOZIC: I know you and Richard Gibbs worked closely together on the mini-series. On a weekly series with new directors every week, and Richard having moved on, how closely do you work with the director of each episode? Or is it mostly producer-run?

McCREARY: Normally the TV show is entirely producer-run. I'm not even sure, on an average basis, how much the directors are involved with post at all. It's not like theatrical films where the director makes a lot of the decisions all the way to the end. Really, it's the executive producer who's 'The Guy'.

I actually never met with any of the directors, except for Michael Rymer who I worked with on episodes 12 and 13. One of the reasons I did that, you know, I think they trust him a lot and he was given a lot of creative freedom and creative power when he came back to direct those last two. So I worked with him very closely on episodes 12 and 13 and his guidance was pivotal in making those orchestral pieces work and getting what they wanted. That was just an awesome experience.

JOZIC: Did you have more time with those last two episodes, because I remember Ron Moore commenting in the podcast how the network had coughed up a little extra money just to make it special. I was wondering if they coughed up a little more time, too?

McCREARY: Nope. No more time.

Like I said, there was a little extra money so we could do an orchestra because they wanted a string orchestra and they temped it with a string orchestra piece and I knew right from the beginning that you can't fake that. Nobody would be happy with synth strings during those sweeping emotional moments. I was very grateful that the people at SciFi are great, obviously.

JOZIC: Battlestar Galactica is the first real science-fiction score you've done, right?

McCREARY: Arguably, yeah.

JOZIC: Arguably?

McCREARY: Well, you know, I've done a lot of independent films and a lot of student films and a lot of shorts…

I've done a lot of weird stuff but this is definitely my first show with spaceships and robots, yeah.

JOZIC: Do these scores allow you to stretch in ways a dramatic score would never allow you to?

McCREARY: I would say so, yeah. But with that said, I score it like a dramatic score, I don't score it like a sci-fi show.

JOZIC: I guess that's the foundation of the show, too.

McCREARY: Absolutely. There are plenty of moments where you get to stretch your sci-fi chops and horror chops - there are a lot of horror cues suspense cues.

For example, one of my favourite moments is in episode 1 where they destroy the Olympic Carrier. It takes place in outer space, you've got spaceships flying around, Starbuck is firing her guns and they're flashing their lights and there's a nuclear bomb and the cylons show up and there is all of this stuff happening, but the whole way it's written and shot and, ultimately the way it was scored, it's really about three or four people. It's about whether the president is going to make this decision of whether Baltar is right or not and whether Apollo and Starbuck will act on the order that they're given. It's just this intimate little drama between these people and when they actually pull back and pull the trigger and blow up the civilian ship, I find it really moving. There wasn't anything in the score, especially at that moment, that was really sci-fi oriented. It was a dramatic scene and the fact that it took place in outer space was kind of arbitrary compared to everything that was happening.

JOZIC: So, do you find yourself drawing more inspiration from the images or from the writing?

McCREARY: From the writing, absolutely from the writing.

JOZIC: So, you go with the characters rather than the…

McCREARY: I go with the characters whenever possible. A lot of the time the philosophy is, if it doesn't help the scene dramatically, don't put music there. The best action scenes are the ones where there is something emotionally at stake, like that one, or the big battle at the end of episode 10. The thing that fascinated me wasn't so much Apollo flying through the tunnel and all the incredible things that were happening, but every time they cut back to Baltar just quivering in the corner in utter horror as to whether he's made a mistake or not. That just drove that entire 10 minute sequence for me, and also Starbuck dealing with her responsibility.

Also, as far as the visuals are concerned, most of them aren't finished when I'm writing music. I get to see them at the end with everybody else.

The one that blew me away, just knocked me off my feet, was in episode 12 where the raptors appear over Kobol and it turns out the cylons are there and there's a big crash. When I scored that there was a series of black cards with text that said "raptors appear, there's a crash, they scream stuff, they fall towards the planet". I mean, there was nothing there, it was like an old silent film where they show the dialogue on the card. So I just wrote some loud really rockin' music and when I saw it at the dub my jaw dropped at how great it looks.

JOZIC: Do you get storyboards?

McCREARY: No, not usually. I mean, season 2 might be a little different, but by the time I got involved in the show they had already cut several episodes and there was just no time.

JOZIC: They just don't make it easy for you, do they?

McCREARY: Man, you don't get a lot of time. You don't get a lot of time but the good thing is that the shows are so good it doesn't take a lot of preparation to figure out what it needs. You look at it and the drama is so tight, so involving, that as a composer it's pretty clear what it needs.